CHAPTER 28: The Opera: Act III; Pt. 5 [cont. 2]
From "The Saga of One F**ked Mother
Legion arrives in West Virginia and rents a car. She dons her well-prepped disguise as a man and proceeds to get the lay of the land in “Grubtrop”, the small town Herry has taken her boys to live. She finds the perfect place for a clandestine meeting on the far end of a cemetery, which is only blocks from their house…if only she can find and connect with them.
After dark, she parks near their house and waits for hours in hopes of seeing her boys. She’s about to give up but spots Zane walking home. After a brief but joyous reunion, he says he’ll try to sneak his brothers away and meet her at the cemetery the next day. Legion is beyond thrilled that she will be finally be with her boys after so long.
In the last section, Legion must fork out more money than she has left for the appeal of the third custody ruling, so she relies on friends to lend her money while she works multiple jobs. She decides to defy court orders and clandestinely visit her boys in disguise. She embarks on the long trip from Iowa to West Virginia, anxious to see them again after years apart…
CHAPTER 28 of Mother-Fucking: The Saga of One Fucked Mother begins with Act III, Part 4 of “The Opera” from Book 3. The Opera has three Acts with five Parts—one for each of the three Family Court and two Appellate Court trials. Chapter 28 covers all of Act III: Part 4: the third Family Court trial, and Part 5: the second Appellate trial. This is a long chapter and will be published in newsletter-sized bites.
Dr. Blue’s novel is based on her own experience of the Custody Crisis. It uniquely conveys how Family Court judges are “mother-fucking” women—a form of systemic oppression—as protagonist Legion is systematically and methodically deprived of her children and money and reduced to “one fucked mother”.
Chapters are stand-alone interesting so you can begin reading anywhere. A Cast of Characters follows to help readers at any point. All published chapters are included in the Section: “Saga of One F**ked Mother” accessible on the top bar of the home page of Women’s Coalition News & Views. Sequential chapters are emailed out every Wednesday so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet!
TEASERS
“Mom … Mom, stop for a sec! What’s with the man-getup?! Ya’ think Herry won’t find out you’re here?! Ya’ think this’ll stop him an’ Fannie from knowing you’ve come out here to Grubtrop?” … “So, Z, can you bring yourself and your brothers to the far east side of the Grubtrop Cemetery tomorrow on Sunday at, O, let’s say, noon?”
I found ‘em! At last, I’ve found them all!
If, as it most surely is, war is the leaving behind of every child, then “civil” family court in custody battles is the leaving behind of every mother who has ever stood up and finally said something which daMan and daJudge did not want to hear, certainly did not want to be held accountable for and absolutely with what neither man wanted to––justly––deal!
BOOK 3: Dr. True's Opera in Three Acts—with Five Parts
CHAPTER 28: The Opera: Act III; Part 5 [cont. 2]
No, there hadn’t been any curtains on the wagon’s windows––and such a vista it always did afford to me, something about the station wagon which I very much liked actually … especially when I was backing up or checking for oncoming traffic to my rear or right side. No, I had just spent about the last eight hours there in the midst of West Virginia’s night air covered and shielded only by Ol’ Black’s metal and glass––as wholly transparent as it could all be. With success. I awakened, the dashboard clock indicated, around 6:00 a.m. and, of course, had right off that Saturday morning … ‘business’ … to take care of. The first of many such, exact, early-morning affairs, er of nature calls, to continuously … ‘manage’.
But I had been mawwied to Herry Edinsmaier.
I knew that Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, at that hour, would himself be physically located nowhere near this––nor any other hospital. After all: this was the same guy who, in his soooo unprimed although quite privileged mornings, had peacefully snoozed clear through two––not only one … but two––different women’s breast biopsy operations!––during which procedures he was supposed to have been present! right there alongside the surgery table to perform and to analyze for the surgeons, as malignant or not, frozen sections on tissues just taken! This was daMan who had not only brushed off those two DEhumans’ days, futures and families by utterly dissing and ditching the importance of them altogether––their very lives––but who had also kept hidden from me and from my Truemaier Boys in October 1987, back when I was dusting off his pornography-purveying den on Othello Drive the Kansas City White Law Firm’s equivalent of a pink slip … sanctioned and sent from Lawyer White to Herry by his Missouri-based employer, Downshim Laboratories––for his, daMan’s, doing so! For Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s … gross incompetence … as a medical doctor!
Nah! I so did not need to worry about unluckily waltzing into Herry at that hour; there was no way that that particular physician would be walking the hallways of Fairvale City Hospital on his way to important shit or something. So. I bopped right in the front rotating, round door and boogied on over to the very nearest women’s restroom––clearly marked as such and quite easy to locate. Something else I noticed while in there was whether or not the facility had an electric socket … to accommodate a blow dryer or curling rod. This one did; I was to learn that many, many public bathrooms do not.
Done and back down to the car with not even one security guard in sight, I breakfasted on leftover snack food from the previous day’s journey: peanuts, raisins, a banana and water. And prepared to walk from that spot to the rental car agency figuring it to open up around 8:00 a.m. One would never have known that the 45-year-old Dr. Legion True was such a credit card-using greenhorn––my having only inaugurated the new plastic on its very first voyage out of my jeans pocket just the day before within Milford, Ohio! It took approximately half an hour to arrive at my destination and another 30 minutes or so to get fixed up with the World’s most stunted and puniest vehicle, I declare! It was no small wonder as to why––when she handed me the keys to its ignition––the Ford Motor Company had named this milky white fleck, now with West Virginia license plates on it, an “Aspire.” Hell, this itty-bitty metallic bump on four tires was trying so hard to grow up to be a real goddamn …car, for chris’sake! But I didn’t care; it was what I could afford, and I had it for a week, no mother-fucking questions asked. Only queries asked of me were ones on which I could legitimately and truthfully answer, and I was in it and driving back over to the Fairvale City Hospital parking lot to exchange into it the items which I wanted from out of now safely parked and static Ol’ Black.
Then I was off to Grubtrop and, at last, … to my Truemaier Boys! Headed back down south on I-79 the same way that I’d come up to Fairvale the night before, it never even crossed my mind––in the very same manner that the thought hadn’t entered the brains of Grace or Frieda or Cyan Song, of Linda or László either––that Mirzah, Zane or Jesse, when I found them, would tell Herry or Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive or even Mary Jane as a matter of fact, that I had come to West Virginia. And, now, with my provisional acquisition of this little, amorphous cardboard pedal-box called Aspire … The Plan was beginning to gel.
The difference, however, on this particular 13-mile stretch over to Grubtrop from the one on it of just the evening before was that now I, on this bright, beautifully clear Saturday morning in April, was tooling ass into Herry’s town inside this tiniest of tooshes dressed as Sam, the concrete truck-driving man. My Iowa driver’s license which the rental agent, of course, needed to see had on it the picture of a caucasian, saffron-coiffed woman and showed a birth date of the Winter Solstice in 1947, and that is exactly who had just rented a week’s worth of use on their two-door Ford. While no cement truck was Aspire and no man was this particular Sam, there was some amount of irony in the whole subterfuge––in that daMan, Herry, before I’d ever known him and, back then, quite the imbiber of all beverages brewed, had once hired on to an Iowa road construction crew during the hot summers between his undergraduate years in college and, there, drove nearly the exact same type of truck as was now slapped onto my covering’s lapel. As a ‘man’ I hauled in from out of town defiance and mockery of Herry Edinsmaier and of his and daJudge’s’ “laws” inside itty-bitty Aspire. And Herry, inside his typical passive aggression and narcissism with laissez-faire/lazy-ass attitude, had hauled in not only that as his waxed version of fathering but also as a drunk man … driving … concrete in for the paving of highways similar to the ones which had just ferried me there into Grubtrop.
The jacket in one of my favorite hues of all time, chocolate brown, had on its nylon windbreaker fabric on my left chest not only the name “Sam” in black stitching but also the picture of a white concrete truck and in white letters on its back the title of Sam’s company, “Weldon Ready Mix,” apparently one situated in a town with no state printed at all and whose letters were too small to readily read from the distances I intended to keep from Herry, from Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive and from anyone else whom I saw quite fit to distrust! Cotton twill work pants of the hardy type day laborers don in the same brown color also came from Ames’ Salvation Army Store. I had a matching, two-piece outfit but not only in the cloth items into which I had changed before leaving Fairvale. A few other of this androcentric countenance’s accoutrements for the role and expression of Sam came out of Ol’ Black and into Aspire as well.
Des Moines has a wondrous collection house called The Theatrical Shoppe. There, I had obtained a salt and pepper wig in the loveliest of Sam Elliott-lengths of waviness along with a similarly speckled piece to adorn my upper lip mustachioed there as it was with its own special glue. Even Mr. Elliott, I am thinking, would have perceived this likeness to his own as … pretty damn close. On my cinder path strolls into the Forestry Department from stashing Ol’ Black in the Brookside Forest in order to save on the University’s parking fee, it occurred to me that I could hide my peaches-and-cream complexion, the only one thing of colossal worth which I had, indeed, inherited from Mehitable, with shards of charcoal lightly rubbed onto my cheeks … in order to simulate Sam’s five-o’clock shadow. Dark glasses with tortoiseshell frames and a simple white baseball cap sans any decoration whatsoever completed Dr. Legion True’s ensemble. The one feature for which I had no cover-up were my hands. I had brought along a pair of chocolate brown, cotton flannel chore gloves made in the genre of which AmTaham and we other farmers, for years and years and years, always have multiple pairs; but I truly thought it already too warm outside to wear them without appearing really weird. Fingernails clipped as short as possible, unpainted of course and with all rings removed, I resolved to keep attention away from my hands by engaging others’ eyeballs directly while passing them cash or other objects and when receiving back change or groceries or other purchases. I drove on into Grubtrop and, perchance, immediately passed by the port’s police station on my left in the northwest corner of the burg … as I did so. I so dubiously doubt, all pun intended, that anyone, flipped and reversed as a Mrs. Doubtfire-like individual, would have given this crazily cogged confluence of cop and con nearly the contempt that I myself, the newest “Sam Elliott” actor, attributed to it!
Off I-79 South then, I took the exit east into Grubtrop proper for the first time in my entire life––although certainly not my last. A squatty little place, it is probably, having never seen it from the air and just guessing after my having been there now a number of times, west to east far shorter than in its north to south direction and is aligned much of that longitudinal stretch right alongside I-79. Within moments then I was at the far east end of Grubtrop and, in getting there, again back to using the highway which was Federal Route #50 from the day before––when I had first entered the west side of Montclank. Aspire needed to be turned around so I did not wind up leaving the city’s limits entirely … so he and I came back west to the first of only two intersections in Grubtrop at which stoplights exist on Route #50 … and took a right, up north––for the hell of it. Learning the lay of this land was my first priority, especially to discover as I had just done, easy exits the fuck out of town––in the case that I ever found myself needing any! This bearing to the right or north took me into the very hilly and, as I was later to know, … newer parts of Grubtrop, West Virginia:––the community’s recreational center consisting of a very small swimming pool and concession stand with a couple of tennis courts and an outdoor basketball arena, a shopping center with just a huge number of stores and miles of parking lot and, overall, more massive than any Ames has ever had with yet another smaller mall or maybe its extension just across a highway divide as well as an extremely tiny park with only one shelter, a walking path and no playground equipment in it at all.
And ... to one of the three Boys’ two schools for that academic year, that is, to Zane’s high school. After Herry’s late October 1991, heinous and secret flight out of Iowa where Mirzah Truemaier had just become a new middle schooler rehearsing for his Mock Trials’ regionals, my youngest Child, to finish out his sixth grade year, was taken aback and put into an elementary school inside Grubtrop, one built in 1909, which today sports on its website … little American Indian-looking children with feathers stuck in the beaded headbands of their black hair. Now, in April 1993, Mirzah was a seventh grader and stuck inside Grubtrop’s big, boxy structure on its south side which was designated as The Middle School––along, as well, with Jesse who was finishing his eighth grade year there. That particular middle school building has subsequently been shut down, its age unknown to me but, to be sure, one at least as old as Grubtrop’s … and Mirzah’s former … elementary school.
Here, however, up north was Zane’s high school, put up in 1963, with a severely bland and ochreish color upon its exterior, not at all a hue of the lovely saffron-blondeness of Zane himself. This place was at where my Truemaier Teenager labored at finishing out his sophomore year and, thus swung heavily as well, into springtime baseball practice––while, after seventh- and eighth-grade classes dismissed for the day, both Mirzah and Jesse for their particular workouts took a schoolbus ride up and over to the cinder arenas near Zane’s ball diamonds as the two of them trained in track and field. Their dark red brick middle school was, as I had found true of many of the buildings in Fairvale too, built atop a tall hill, not really a mountain, but with no other facilities about it––not even having what appeared to me to be much in the way of staff and teacher parking except on steep, side street inclines. I left its presence quickly––having seen all I needed to see and returned to the area of Zane’s high school … not far at all, I figured out, from an I-79 exit headed back up north to Fairvale … and my Hotel Ol’ Black.
Realizing that after dismissal, Jesse and Mirzah would be coming to the outdoor areas of the high school for track practice, I decided to concentrate on learning all that I could about various folks’ comings and goings to this tract of Grubtrop property. Then, there was the external evidence all over the region that the symbol of this “educatory” place was an American Indian chieftain: headdress, feathers, distinct savage profile and all––including the phrase repeated on concession signs and fencing backdrops in several spots of … the Grubtrop Indians. Today, after a decade and more of other communities grappling with the same racist blatancy as this school’s not-so-charismatic portrayal, when one surveys its high school’s several web pages and citations, no outright reference to the town’s actual honoring of any real, residential Grubtrop Indian, past or present, is anywhere online––only an upper left-hand corner pictorial … displaying a generic chieftain which alludes, of course, to the school’s team name and, thereby, … its “native arrowhead” representation. Recalling Ames’ loveliest of school networks, Herry-Daddee’s affidavit–LIE to the Aggrandizier that “all Truemaier Boys would finish out their secondary educations in Ames” with its mascot, a wee, black tornado … The Blonde, also victimized, maligned … choked hard. And continued with my local explorations of this xenophobic land.
Sam Elliott talked to nearly no one, the Aspire’s tank full when I had initially left the rental agency so its driver need not gas up but only … carefully … get in to use those stations’ restrooms for bodily elimination. Other good such venues came to be the local Wal-Mart store’s bathroom and the Grubtrop Hardee’s and its McDonald’s as well. The Wal-Mart women, who were its only clerks of course, seemed to love to open up to Sam about everything going on up at the high school––right down to the fact that Spring Break was ending that very weekend with “Easter an’ all” and if it weren’t for “wonnerful, wonnerful” baseball, why then the kids’d “be left with just school to go back to.” Apparently baseball was king in Grubtrop … literally. Like most places everywhere, only the boys participated, that is––with its girls either in track or stompin’ and a-hollerin’ from up in the bleachers and, thereby, so “whooping” on their favorite team of “warrior” ballplayers, these “Indians” somewhat bigger and taller apparently than the bigoted town’s elementary ones.
By late that very Saturday afternoon of the 10th, I had pretty much gotten the entire grasp of the full feel for Grubtrop, West Virginia –– especially for those places where 13-, 14- and 16-year-old Boys might hang out or spend time of any sort … all of its four schools with two of them elementary and each having some semblance of playground equipment in their yards, the public library crazily cramped with books––even stacked up helter-skelter on every one of its windowsills, the few town parks tiny for the most part and absent nearly any structures for kiddos to play on at all save for one in the southwest part of town with a rather lovely pond in which I thought perhaps Zane and Jesse might try to fish. This specific park spread itself out not very far at all from the town’s main post office––at exactly where King Herod with his trusty Nottingham Sheriff McLive had, again, fucked me over … nearly right away shutting down that rented postal service mailbox which I had from such a long, long distance leased for the Truemaier Boys’ receipt of Dr. Legion True’s letters and packages. I now knew of, too, almost all of Grubtrop’s individual stores, gasoline stations, grocery outlets and supermarkets––a whole passel of these it seemed, its fast-food joints and pay phones … most easily accessible from Aspire’s narrowly opened driver’s side car window, its small municipal airport onto which unaccompanied Mirzah, Jesse and then-vomiting Zane had landed after the mother-fucking fiasco with Mehitable … upon our all burying Grandpa AmTaham just the very April before and out of which, I came to later know, Fairy-Pixie Herry nearly every Saturday morning sucked up bookoo time and many, many dollars just flying around for fun almost always alone but also with Mirzah alongside a couple of times. Loathing shopping at all as much as I do, I had by this late hour even scoped out Grubtrop’s four––count ‘em … four! malls as well as its one old banking structure and its one colossal catholic church done up in newly appearing white stone slab with a mighty saintly sounding name on its sign. City hall, the police station, the firehouse––and, quite importantly, safe and quick routes out of town … including even the railroad crossings and how and where the train tracks ran through parts of Grubtrop.
The favorite spot I located was the east end cemetery––almost within shouting distance of the Edinsmaier residence. O JYeah, by now, I knew where that was situated, too, also inside a nice-looking neighborhood, one without adult trees yet of course, of that upper north side of really, really red rose-brick, ranch styles––all of them trimmed in white. It arose out of one of several newer residential sections of Grubtrop although quite a step less in grandiosity than the one-story with its so frozen, unstable and utterly unusable basement back in Ames but, like Aspire in the vehicle genre, this current house of Dr. Edinsmaier’s from its exterior at least appeared as if also “trying to grow up” to become as the Slacker’s former bachelor pad back at 5221 Othello Drive, his fucker which had abutted itself upside the Brookside Forest near 13th Street! The Good and Wonderful Doctor’s residence now, like many in Grubtrop, also sat propped on top of a bulge leading as it did to a very, very fine, skinny line of a paved street out in front which dropped straightaway down from its precipitous perch way up there.
Narrow avenues meandered everywhere throughout this entire town. One traversing in a vehicle was required to stop all of the time in order to just go on down the street. Needed to stop in order to allow others with the right-of-way or at least the appearance of that right to pass me by, and then it was my turn to proceed forward. With cars parked on either side of the streets, there was in most places then and almost all of the time that I could see, only one lane open to motorists.
The Grubtrop graveyard rolled itself out on the very east edge of daMan’s neighborhood as well as that of the whole community and simply bore the town’s name as its own, Grubtrop Cemetery. It was sparse in tall trees, too, though not in hilltop headstones and monuments of course, but did have some strategically situated stands upon its two, far mountainsides that afforded not only cover and privacy but also cool concrete benches constructed just for my visiting and reading and meditating and, I suppose, others’ crying or lamenting, too. Of all of the locales researched so far in Grubtrop, I thoroughly liked this entire space and resolved, aprovechar-fashion, because of its proximity to my Babies to use it that springtime to my fullest advantage.
But it was Saturday night, darkening now around 9:30ish and with my already losing an entire day of my planned eight, there was one thing about this odd West Virginia community which was truly, truly weirding me out: noooo kiddos anywhere. I had seen hardly a child out and about in this town anywhere where I had thus far studied. It was a christian holiday weekend, that was true; but still, Jury, almost no one around after their Spring Break week just ending? Another fact was so also: the very few playgrounds I had encountered did not have much in the way of interesting, colorful or strenuously and physically challenging equipment inside them all––over which children could romp. Mirzah loved to swim but it was April, and its pool had not yet opened; still no one was even down at the tennis or basketball courts that lay out alongside the pool. A few children accompanied adults inside the Wal-Mart Store, the shopping malls and the supermarkets which I had investigated, but uncannily it appeared to me to be a town of very few kids––outside, at least. The necropolis where my day so far was ending and turning into nighttime seemed far less eerie than the sites I thought should have shown little spirits breathing––and running around and screaming and laughing and … being!
On this particular weekend of the year I’d seen plenty of commercial evidence of easter inside all of those stores yet not one dyed egg hunt nor a bonny bonnet nor yellow chick or pink bunny in sight outside anywhere. The patriarchy’s horror house of things cathologically magical, mythical and soooo unreasonable … at where Grubtrop’s newest, pillared Good and Wonderful Doctor now weekly genuflected … splayed itself out, appropriately enough, at the very bottom of Horrid Herod’s hummocky hillock. His constricted street tumbled and rippled south down from his double driveway about nine or eleven shortened blocks’ worth or more past older homes, mostly wooden two-stories, almost all painted white and built I guessed around the 1920s and 30s and 40s and, at its end finally, rather t-boned right there with the entrance into the church’s parking lot. The perpendicular throughway east and west past this churchliness then is Grubtrop’s Main Street––simultaneously stretching latitudinally … as that federal highway thoroughfare also known as … U.S. Route #50. Even around that large asphalt area with narrow strips of grassiness and some low-growing, dark evergreen shrubbery planted right up around the minister’s massive narthex, not one child scampered here or there grappling for a blue- or an orange-colored egg.
I parked Aspire compassed due north toward where I perceived my Boys to most likely be … inside Herry’s house. The wispy white car was stopped on the west side midway up from the t-intersection along daMan’s street, still probably five to seven blocks away from the actual Edinsmaier domicile, however. The sky was now completely dark, its only illumination coming up the street to me from a yard lamp hovering high over and probably protecting the property of that catholic church; and at 10:30 p.m. Eastern, Sam was trying to admit to myself that while the day had been most productive in that I had certainly learned a lot, it was time now to close down this week for good, drive back on up to Fairvale and Ol’ Black, turn in at my mobile motel there in its hospital’s parking lot and get some sleep.
Heavy-hearted, I was so disappointed. But not crying. I was not crying. Dr. Legion True had made the deal with myself the evening before whilst crossing the state line into this land of “poverty with a view” that though a man I was not, while Sam was in the King’s current Kingdom––this West Virginia territory, perhaps I should become there, as necessary for the time being and the Operation BWB project at hand, as hard-hearted as the inglorious one who occupied the manor grouted with maroon mortar on his mount.
I swallowed that throat lump again arising and put my right hand to the key in the ignition … catching sight, as I did so, of a sashaying silhouette in the rearview mirror. The entirely blackish person backdropped by that pole light towering beside the church had to still be a good 300 yards, maybe four football fields away, and was just turning into the street off of Route #50 but definitely ambling up the roadway in my direction.
I adjusted the mirror in the middle of Aspire’s front windshield so as to keep in my view a fuller back-directed vista of this person as the walker drew nearer, straightening my wig and checking the positioning of the matching moustache and baseball cap as well. When the figure actually got close enough to pass by the car, I intended to point my covered head downward as if studying something in my lap in front of me; and of course, both of its doors were already locked. “O, m’good goddess. Dare it be?! O, O, O my. My, my … my, my, my. That’s pretty much about how tall he’d be. Truly! An’, and, even more than that, that just simply has to be him! That is his gait. I know it. I just know it is. Only my Zane carries his shoulders and his trunk thataway. Truly it just might be him. Alone? 10:30 at night? Out in the late dark like this all alone!? O Jeesh!”
Any mother I know, and have recounted this episode to since, likewise thoroughly thus knows her kiddos––even the ones whom she has not actually even seen for, well, … by this mid April 1993, we four were traipsing into our 18th month … physically separated from each other. Except for the hurried-up grief, the irritable bowel and gastroenteritis-type sicknesses, Silly Sister-Ardys’s refutation and Sterling’s and Mehitable’s outright screaming rejection that had all been the true character of their dying and death ceremonies for Righteous Ancestor AmTaham, not since the flop of the Agnes and P.M. Flunk evening in Ames on the Monday night of 28 October 1991, when Jesse’d run away and those weeks just prior to that whole Herod Edinsmaier-generated and-visited-down-upon-us gutting and carnage … had the Truemaier Boys and I spent hours of close-up time with each other.
Still, a mama just does not forget. In my back-ass envisioning I could not make a thing out about this person other than the height and its carriage, so blackened was every other bit of the creature––yet all of that obscurity notwithstanding, I refused to lower my head as I’d earlier planned to do and, instead, as the person was upon Aspire and me and approximately seven or eight feet parallel to the car’s frame, my eyeballs gazed straight onto his profile through the passenger window’s glass.
The lock was up, the driver’s door flung open and the left sneaker planted out onto the concrete with my right still on the floorboard in what must have been an instant, “It is you! Zane, it is you!” No caution whatsoever on my part did I now demonstrate, that was for sure!
Sixteen-year-old Zane Truemaier was probably ten feet onward northerly beyond the right front end of Aspire when he heard the unlatching car door’s—and—my words’, almost simultaneous noisiness. His torso spun around an imaginary axis on his left side to, in the solid blackness of this nighttime, face Sam square on, yet with my right foot inside on the car’s floor. In so, so typical teenage-ese, Zane dropped his jaw and, with both arms and palms splayed out from their sides, exclaimed, “Wha’th’FUUUUCK!? Mom! What?! Wow!”
“Zane, you can tell it’s me?!? Shit, you should be running off as fast as possible the other way,” Zane was walking back toward me now and over onto the driver’s left side of Aspire. “I taught you, didn’t I, to run away from strangers! Ya’ know, from strangers acting like they know you or are coming toward ya’! Not to stick around and certainly not to talk to ‘em! Right off you could tell it was me, could you?!?”
“Hell YES, I can, Mom!”
“Shii – iit! I thought this was a better disguise than it’s turning out to be, Darling!” We hugged and hugged and hugged. I kissed his neck and both of his cheeks and breathed him in as deeply as a mother possibly could … the scent, the all-‘round aroma of her own son. I just could not let go of him. Soooo fortunately for us, … there occurred not another spirit in sight on that Saturday night street! To this hour, knowing from such the faraway distance that that total yardage must have been after my first just catching a glimpse of him in the mirror like I had, knowing then that this silhouetted stature was most likely my child, well, … I count the serendipity of that night and all of my Ames friends and those two car mechanics in Ohio who had been my supporters along the way to that very point as having eventually also led on up to my very own … restoration.
“Mom … Mom, stop for a sec! What’s with the man-getup?! Ya’ think Herry won’t find out you’re here?! Ya’ think this’ll stop him an’ Fannie from knowing you’ve come out here to Grubtrop?”
“Well, aaaah yeah, I’m wanting exactly that actually, Z. O, O god, you look wonderful, Babe! How are you? O, just get in the car. We’ll go off somewhere behind a mountain and talk.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
“Ya’ can’t? O. Aaaah … Okaaaay.”
“Well, it’s jus’, um, it’s just that I, ah, I’m out after, um, aaaah, … after curfew, Mom!” Zane really wasn’t too, too worried, I could tell, about what would be my take on this specific behavior of his––let alone, about my telling anyone, that was for damned sure. His hesitation in telling me this, I am thinking, was merely because teens are supposed to be reticent about admitting such activity to any parent! Plus, furthermore, the two of us in particular––as parent and adolescent youth––hadn’t actually interacted for 18 months or more!
“OOOO! Jeesh! Curfew?!?”
“Yeeeeah, Ma, this town has a 10:30 curfew!”
“Whoa! No! No, I certainly didn’t know that, Zane! Of all I now know about Grubtrop, I did not know about its curfew!” I was smiling and shaking my head and trying to hide from him, not so well I am certain, my mirth at his resourcefulness actually! It … reminding me of my own now and also way back then, too––when I had been 14, 15, 16, 17 and …, as a female with a tyrannical and puritanical parent within the likes of Mehitable, even so much older than 18! … that male-identified woman’s condemning judgment and controlling manipulation loooong into my DEhuman’s adulthood.
“Yeah, it does. I was just coming home from Huck’s; he’s a friend of mine, Mom. I was trying to get back ‘fore Herry gets home. Cuz, aaaah, um, Herry thinks I’m already home. He went to the movies, and I’m supposed to’ve been home tonight … all along; I wasn’t supposed to be out. He said so. Aaaah, aaaah. Yeah. That’s why I can’t get in the car, ya’ know.”
“O! Well! … Aaaah, no! Ya’ can’t. Ya’ better hurry on up there then,” and I motioned in the direction of on up the street that would, at it progressed somewhat skyward in the little lofty route I had just corralled Zane from earlier ascending, put him in about ten minutes’ time or less right at Herry-Daddee’s driveway––and, with a bit of kismet, also at the safety from all things untoward. “So, Z, can you bring yourself and your brothers to the far east side of the Grubtrop Cemetery tomorrow on Sunday at, O, let’s say, noon? Think you and Herry and the rest of allya’ll be having a holiday dinner then? Ya’ know, ham and all the fixings? Or … or not? Cuz, if not, well, by noon then, why, the three of you all wanting to go out and find your friends or go off and do something on Sunday, well, that wouldn’t look too suspicious by that time at all, would it?”
“Hell! A family dinner?! You’re kidding, Mom! No! No, there won’t be any family dinner?! Yeah! I’ll tell ‘em and we’ll all try to come. Far side of the graveyard! Tomorrow! I love you, Mom. Be careful! I gotta go.” Hug, hug, kiss, kiss, quick, quick––and off he dashed sprinting uphill north into the complete darkness.
“O, I love you, too, Zane!” He glanced back around at me one time and then continued his swift departure and promising evasion from Herry’s detection. From inside Aspire I just watched my loveliest, eldest Son fade off until I couldn’t make him out any longer. All of this encounter had left me breathless yet utterly calm and buoyantly brimming. I sighed, “Mission accomplishing! Mission BWB is actually happening! Whoa! Just when I was thinking I’d up and lost another day to just searching and searching for Zane and for Jesse and for Mirzah, I haven’t! I found ‘em! At last, I’ve found them all! O, it’s early in Iowa, only about 10 p.m. there. Love that Central Time Zone!” Still a darkened and deserted street, still with no one venturing out upon it anywhere and certainly, right then, not Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, nor Herry and Fannie together, home from the theaters just yet, on its narrowness I pulled a three-point, 180-degree turnabout and straightaway headed for the payphone one could use from inside a vehicle, a telephone which I had spotted at the corner convenience store on Grubtrop’s Main Street, its Route #50. While I may have looked somewhat manly to some, the less Dr. Legion True was fully exposed the safer I felt––plus it was nearing 11 p.m., and I truly did not know the flavor and tenor of this town specifically with regard to unaccompanied females out alone long after darktime––and I was not about to risk this wondrous upcoming week with my Boys by putting myself into settings from where I couldn’t escape safely enough. I would work to take back my nights from their endangering and evil thieves … later on.
For now, I was just content to tell Grace and Linda and Cyan Song and László my so, so happy tidings. After all, for all of their planning and support and endeavors on my and the Truemaier Boys’ behalves, they, too, deserved this particularly fabulous news––that Mirzah, Jesse and Zane had all been found! And that, fortuitously, I had not been––that is, that I had not been found … out about! So far––soooo, so good!
* * * *
Back at the far bottom corner of the Fairvale Hospital’s visitors’ lot, Ol’ Black and I reconnected––or rather, the cushioned bed in its “back room” and I did! It was midnight local time. What a fulfilling day’s worth I had had––and probably one of those changing moments in a person’s life when she or he begins to thoroughly take in the tremendous value that one fulfilled day within her or his lifetime truly, truly has!
On 11 April 1993, others’ day of irrationality, unreasonableness, bunny-chicken egg non-science and, specifically, dead man-(and, most certainly, not dead woman-) rising-back-to-breathing magic, and nearly at high noon … my breath was again taken away. I purposefully left off Sam’s accoutrements and in the back seat of Aspire, at hand if quickly necessary; but I did not want in the light of our first daytime in months together to frighten Jesse or Mirzah or even waste visiting time trying to explain to them the necessity of why the costume––although, with those specific two, explanation wouldn’t at all have taken up much in the way of time. I was atop the second, long hillock on the backside of Grubtrop Cemetery––probably a distance to the east of another four football fields or more from the town’s last north-south traversing street. That one was three streets east of and about ten blocks south of Herry’s house, and, after knowing the path and neighborhood now, I estimate in walking time maybe a strong 20 to 25 minutes’ trek from daMan’s doorway to the concrete bench I was occupying.
Of course, this day would be an easy one in the cemetery; it was a holiday and not Memorial Day so folks would not be disturbing there the peace of their dead nor, for that matter, that of me, its latest Phantom of the Graveyard, because most all would be enjoying family time together in backyard barbecues or sumptuous sit-down ham dinners. Arriving early and in the broadest of beautiful sunshine, I stood up on this knoll and gazed and gazed and searched and searched––watching particularly another t-boning intersection, the one where that last avenue of the town ran past a west-east street which I thought might be the one the Truemaier Boys would take to come to me.
They did. I gasped. Again––at that great of a distance, three entirely familiar figures finally emerged, the only three people out and about! Upon any of the streets that, from that superb, skyscraping spot, I could surveil. And, again, like the night before when I could just tell by the height and the gait of the mystery person at such a stretch of street when it was Zane solo, I could also, with these three people, immediately just tell they were, indeed … My Boys! I have—since that first sighting of all three of them that far away––often, often pondered how we mothers do it. How do we do it: how do we stand this? How do we stand for this, Jury––this forced isolation and invisibility to each other? If, as it most surely is, war is the leaving behind of every child, then “civil” family court in custody battles is the leaving behind of every mother who has ever stood up and finally said something which daMan and daJudge did not want to hear, certainly did not want to be held accountable for and absolutely with what neither man wanted to––justly––deal!
Not exactly Gettysburg and, indeed for us struggling but immutable mothers and women most certainly not 1863, this particular Cemetery Hill, the Grubtrop one in the Union’s breakaway state of West Virginia where two years earlier in that mid 19th Century one could be certain that a total of zero of its legislative delegates were mothers because none of them were female, afforded the passionate four Iowa Yanks of Jesse, Zane, Mirzah and Legion then, the most ghostly of secret yet stalwart strongholds in our ongoing battle against … being kept apart. Against the bloodying and conquering, divisive troops maintaining the Virginian manner of mindlessness––that is, of secession between children and mother maneuvered by King Herod and all of his judges, Shyster Shindy Scheisser, Nottingham Sheriff Fannie Issicran McLive, even that corralling daughter of hers, Mary Jane. Over its periphery’s four foot-high wall of mortared stones in different colors of mauve and gray and slate and charcoal all three of the Boys scaled and now inside the confines of the graveyard grounds per se, they made this bright, bright sunshiny holiday their sauntering promenade around similarly hued headstone and monument after headstone in full view of all of the partying townspeople apparently totally self-involved and, most helpfully, … indoors. And up the hill on its far side.
To me. To me, their ma! The “property rights” of ownership and sole access to these children by only Father Herod Edinsmaier, the Exalted Sperm-Sourced Biodaddee––be itself … fucked.
[to be continued…]
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Dr. Legion True: One Fucked Mother
Dr. Herod (Herry) Edinsmaier: Legion’s husband/Sperm Source [“re: I am snide” backwards]
Zane Truemaier: Legion’s son
Mirzah Truemaier: Legion’s son
Jesse Truemaier: Legion’s son
AmTaham True: Legion’s father [Mahatma backwards]
Mehitable True: Legion’s mother [Me hit-able—i.e. she was abusive]
Ardys and Endys: Legion’s sisters [names backwards]
Sterling: Legion’s brother [her mother’s planned name of next son (who never came)]
Mi Sprision O'Revinnoco: Herry’s sister [misprision: concealing knowledge of treason/O'Revinnoco = O'Connivero backwards]
Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier: Legion’s father-in-law [juggernaut; aut = 0; misein = “to hate (misogyny)”]
Detanimod Edinsmaier: Legion’s mother-in-law [dominated backwards]
Ava Saffron True and Zebulon True: respectively, Legion's paternal grandmother and her husband, Legion's paternal grandfather
Rowland and Wyman Natures: respectively, Legion's most favored uncle and most favored male first cousin
Fannie Issicran McLive: fawning enabler of ex [narcissi(st) and Mc(Evil) backwards]
Mary Jane: daughter of Fannie Issicran McLive; stepsister of Zane, Jesse, and Mirzah
Legion’s Friends: Margaret, Mona, Yanira, Stormy, Lynda, László, Jane, Kincaid, Joseph, Sheryl, Abraham (Quaker elder), Frieda, Teri Lynn
Legion’s Best Friends: Ms Grace and Dr Lionel Portia and Rachel
Wende: = Legion's friend after divorce [committed suicide due to Custody Crisis]
Cyan Song Goodwater: boys’ art teacher
Jim Cornball: Herry’s acquaintance from AA and realtor
Loser Lorn: Insurance agent referred by Cornball
Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor: 1st Family Court judge
Judge Harley Butcher: 2nd Family Court judge
Judge Barry Crowrook: Appellate Court judge
Judge Pansy Shawshank: Appellate Court judge
Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor: District Court judge on first two trials
Judge Allen Donnellson: Chief, Appellate Court for second and third trials' appeals
Judge Harley Butcher: District Court judge for third trial
Jazzy Jinx: Legion’s first Family Court lawyer
Carlotta Klutz: Legion’s second Family Court attorney
Shindy Scheisser: Herry’s lawyer [shindy = noisy; scheisser = German for shithead]
Li Zhang: Herry’s Aussie affair
Dr Freddie Goldstein & Ella: Herry’s colleague and wife
Mick: = Herry's acquaintance from high school; best man [not in Herry’s life after that as he had no true friends]
Varry Wussamai: Herry's AA sponsor (not a real friend) [I am a wuss backwards]
David Humes: nursing student; classmate of Legion's, y1968 - y1971, New York City
Edmund Silver: Legion's boyfriend pre-Herry
Braemore St: where Legion and her family lived, y1983 - y1986
Havencourt condominium: Legion's Ames apartment; after separation
Zephyr: tabby cat of Zane's, Mirzah's, Jesse's [pronounced “Zay – fear”]
Rex: Jesse’s pet Eastern Florida Kingsnake, female
Lady: Zane's pet Zebra Finch, female
Madonna: realtor
Larry Brouhaha: court-mandated marriage counselor
Dr. Shark: Herry’s residency supervisor who fired him
Carrie Canard: twice judge-mandated custody evaluator
Ms Tsianina Snowball: Legion's friend who instructs her in re The Look
Fairvale, Montclank & Grubtrop: WV cities Herry moved boys to
Author: Dr. Blue, aka Ofherod, BSN, DVM, PhD = Commander Edinsmaier's Handmaid (Commander reiamsnidE's Handmaid)
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